I've got a nice problem with my 10GB harddisk.I've configured 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition that contains 3 logical partitions (see output of sfdisk below). Intentionally I've left 1GB unassigned to be used either as Windows98 or Linux spare place. For clean-up of the the Windows partition (/dev/hda1) I've added a new logical partition using all space that was left, rebooted Windows, formatted the (new) D drive and put my data there. Nothing went wrong until this step ... . Then I wanted to reboot Linux, but Windows (for unknown reasons) did not properly shut down. This meant: reboot Windows and let it do the automatic scandisk. After Windows had finally started the D drive (/dev/hda8) was lost ... a little bit anoying for the data I still wanted to verify, but so what!
The problem I've now is that I can no more cfdisk, fdisk or sfdisk to reconfigure partition 8. The first two utilities simply return a read error on /dev/hda, fdisk in addition provides a warning about the number of cylinders.
sfdisk provides the following output (created with `script disk.problem'):
Script started on Wed Aug 2 21:05:51 2000 vbNtbk:~ # sfdisk -uS -d /dev/hda read: Success sfdisk: read error on /dev/hda - cannot read sector 4132205439 # partition table of /dev/hda unit: sectors /dev/hda1 : start= 63, size= 8194977, Id= b, bootable /dev/hda2 : start= 8195040, size= 529200, Id=83 /dev/hda3 : start= 8724240, size= 4203360, Id=83 /dev/hda4 : start= 12927600, size= 6713280, Id= 5 /dev/hda5 : start= 12927663, size= 529137, Id=82 /dev/hda6 : start= 13456863, size= 1587537, Id=83 /dev/hda7 : start= 15044463, size= 2101617, Id=83 vbNtbk:~ # exit Script done on Wed Aug 2 21:06:04 2000
I looks that the partition table is still OK (except that /dev/hda8 is missing). I guess that the read error of cfdisk and fdisk are due to the unreasonable sector number 4132205439 (compared to start sector of /dev/hd7). It may be that partition 8 somehow got corrupted and now has an unreasonable entry in the partition table.
My questions are: 1) Where does this huge sector number come from, it would be nice to know?2) How can I correct it without recreating the partition table from scratch (a rather tedious approach) with e.g. `cfdisk -z'? Is there a way how I can just create a tiny partition 8 (and remove it afterwards)?
Your advide is very appreciated, Stephan ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com